Many smaller electronic devices like
high-end
smartphones and PMPs are already coming with OLED screens. These
screens consume less power than LCD counterparts making for longer
run times. Another benefit is that an OLED panel tends to offer
better colors than a comparable LCD.

LG has announced at the
FPD International 2009 show in Yokohama City, Japan that it will be
launching a new 15-inch
OLED TV on the market by the end of 2009. The set reportedly will
have a resolution of 1366 x 768 and a peak luminance of 450cd/m2. The
panel will use a bottom emission type and is constructed of
low-temperature polycrystal Si-TFTs crystallized by a high-temp
process.

LG has plans beyond 15-inch OLED screens with 20-inch
and larger panels coming in 2010, 30-inch and larger coming in 2011,
and 40-inch and over panels in 2012. LG OLED marketing and sales VP
Won Kim said, "Forty-inch and larger OLED panels will be fairly
expensive in 2012, but they will be available in the
market."

Consumers will have to wait until 2016 to see
the price of OLED panels drop below the price of LCD panels. The
reason is that a stable supply of large OLED panels at a low cost is
unavailable today. Big challenges for OLED panels today include
driver elements, organic EL materials, and the sealing process.

Kim
said, "We will be able to use a low-temperature polycrystal
silicon with the sixth-generation size glass substrate." He
continued, "However, for 40-inch and larger panels, we have to
use the eighth-generation size glass substrate. Therefore, we have to
develop equipment that can deal with an SPC process at a temperature
of more than 700°C."

According to LG, its OLED panels
will use florescent materials until 2011 and then move to
phosphorescent materials after 2012. When 2016 rolls around OLED
panels will be 20-30% lower in material cost and have an equivalent
yield to LCD panels today. In 2012, the OLED panel will have a 50%
higher material cost and 30% lower yield than LCD panels.

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The stupid part of that is why there still is overscan. TVs are now digital, not analog, and as such there is no ambiguous area that may or may not fill the tv screen anymore; you give us 1920x1080p, so why should it not map 1:1 perfectly?

It's the most ****ing annoying thing to watch 1080i on cable and have words at the bottom and sides slightly cut off for no good reason whatsoever.

But I think it has more to do with the tv than the broadcast because 1080i on my TV from the computer is also cut off, and only via nVidia's control panel can I make it not cut off in the screen. Perhaps once tv's are made to not work with analog signals period, overscan will disappear by default and not require a special setting.

There are even worse issues. Some DVDs are designed with the expectation of overscan. The extra information that is displayed if you disable overscan can be unintentionally shown. You can seem boom mics and things like pants on people who were supposed to be naked (Big Fish).

Overscan and curved screens are some of the worst parts of the CRT era. I had a tv once with overscan so bad that text windows in some of my SNES RPGs were getting cut off. It was really hard for content developers to account for it as all tvs were different. If you play FFVI in an emulator like bsnes today, you can see that the devs did not draw within 10px of the edge so that no one would have cut off text like they did in FFIV.

Hate to say this, but you know all of those gazillions of CRT analog TV's that were being used with overscan? They haven't been all thown away. They're still around with adapters on them (and in some countries probably still picking up analog broadcast). The CRTs still overscan.

But that said, that's not really the "problem" for many. Broadcast still assumes overscan. The broadcast world has not changed just because of the TV broadcast system -- and non-broadcast TV certainly has had no reason to change. As mentioned in the article linked to, when using a 1080P Plasma like we use (on direcTV no less), when watching SD feeds (they still do have those, not everybody is HD) many will visibly show on the screen digital data on the top of the screen. Data that is the closed captioning for the stream that is assumed non-visible due to overscan. Now, someday either purists like myself who want to keep the 1:1 pixel mapping and not overscan my HDTV will give up, or the systems that have been running for a zillion years with that closed captioning data (and some other things) will change such that it's not there (like on HD channels).

But for the time being, there still are overscanning crt TV's being used, and there are systems designed assuming the overscanning still being sent out to those tv's.

I believe it has something to do with the RAM used for addressing each pixel. I read once that 1366x768 fills a 1 MB RAM buffer completely, giving the panel the opportunity to resolve about 5% more detail on a 1080p/i signal vs a 1280x720 panel 'for free' as far as RAM is concerned. No idea where I read that, so I can't cite it, sorry.